Or what I learned about Internet marketing from a 120 year old bookâ€¦

Claude C. Hopkins was one of the greatest advertising men of his day (1866-1932).Â After an extremely successful career, one that earned him a fortune in his day, he set out to record the principles that he uncovered and to write out his general philosophy on how to attain success in advertising.

The first principle he writes about as outlined in Scientific Advertising is that everything must be tracked and tested. We should never count on our own opinions or the opinions of a few others to decide whatâ€™s best where advertising and marketing are concerned.

Mastery is gained by repetition, tracking and learning from experience. Itâ€™s been said that it takes 7 years to master something or roughly 10,000 hours of study and application; however, if you continue to do the same things over and over during those 10,000 hours, itâ€™s unlikely youâ€™ll come anywhere close to mastering Internet marketing strategy or any other worthwhile skill.

When it comes to marketing, and especially Internet marketing, everything significant you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis should be tracked and tested.

Here are a few snippets from Hopkins book. Keep in mind these ideas are over 100 years old.

â€œIndividuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a part of the organizationâ€™s equipment, and a guide to all who follow. Thus, in the course of decades, such agencies become storehouses of advertising experiences, proved principles, and methods.â€

â€œNearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences. Under these conditions, where they long exist, advertising and merchandising become exact sciences. Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.â€

â€œWe learn principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising, by traced returnsâ€¦ We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle.â€

â€œOur final conclusions are always based on cost per customer or cost per dollar of sale.â€

â€œSome things we learn in this way apply only to particular linesâ€¦others apply to all lines. They become fundamentals for advertising in general. They are universally applied. No wise advertiser will ever depart from those unvarying laws.â€

So how do you go about tracking and testing your online marketing efforts?

The first way is to install an analytics system such as Google Analytics on your website.

An analytics system will attract the majority of activity that takes place on your site.

The second way is to create and maintain a tracking journal. A tracking journal is simply a document you create where you track your marketing activities over the course of time. Ideally you will monitor and record your activities week to week. Luckily much of the work is done for you by your analytics system, however, there is still a lot of information that your analytics system canâ€™t account for.

For example the delay between when you promote a story on Digg or another social news site and when that story begins generating traffic to your site. Or how long it takes Google to recognize an inbound link after itâ€™s been created from another site that you own. These are good things to know and things that can only be figured out by meticulous tracking.

A few of the things is would be good to track include:

The date of any posts to your blog and where you promoted these posts online

The date, websites uses, and number of links you create on any given day

Any and all changes to your pay-per-click marketing campaigns

Any videos, emails or other content you create that resides on a third party website

Any social media campaigns

Your social media graph or the growth of your social networks over time

The amount of traffic your sites receive each month

The number of leads and sales youâ€™re making each month

And so onâ€¦

I prefer to use Google Docs for this kind of thing so I always have easy access to the tracker wherever I am. The tracker should be used with your analytics reports â€“ compare them from time to time, every 1-2 weeks so you maintain a tight watch on whatâ€™s working and whatâ€™s not.

Tracking leads to specific knowledge instead of generalities and specific knowledge of what works is powerful. Specific knowledge is what you should be after here. And the more specific you get in terms of results being generated, the more of an edge youâ€™ll have over the vast number of people who operate on general principles, who fail to track, and who end up operating sloppily as a result.

If Hopkins was alive today, I think heâ€™d end this post with this final, concise reminder. Take it to heart and apply it to your own online marketing and traffic generation efforts:

â€œSuccess is a rarity, maximum success an impossibility, unless one is guided by laws as immutable as the law of gravitation. No guesswork is permitted.â€ â€“ Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

The first thing everyone should understand is that there are only two fundamental types of traffic: paid and unpaid. Paid traffic includes: online advertising such asÂ pay-per-click marketing, and banner advertising. Unpaid traffic or natural traffic is traffic that your site receives without you having to directly invest in getting it there. Examples would be a wellÂ optimized websiteÂ showing up in the search results for terms a phrases people are searching for, social media traffic that has resulted from people taking an interest in what your business offers, any press or coverage you receive from bloggers or main stream media that was not paid for.

A couple of quick thoughts on the two types of traffic:

Ideally, every website would be promoted with a combination of the two.

Natural traffic (unpaid traffic) still has a cost in terms of time and energy invested to create the content people are visiting in the first place

Paid traffic is often short term while natural or unpaid traffic often continues to bring in traffic for an extended period of time. For example, a banner ad only brings in traffic as long as you pay for it but a well written blog post or nicely put together video on Youtube may continue to bring in traffic for years to come.

Investing VS Spending

Another fundamental concept is that every time you do something to grow your web presence, it should be seen as an investment and not an expense or cost. This may not be the proper way to look at it from an accountantâ€™s point of view but I find that if you look at putting the money, time, and effort into marketing your site as an investment itâ€™s easier to do. Your online marketing especially should be seen as an investment that needs to pay you a return. If thereâ€™s no potential return then whatâ€™s the point? I bring this up because many people still have the old advertising mentality that thinks that advertising and marketing is an expense that may or may not pay off.Â

Aside from making it easier to do, there is another reason for adopting this line of thinking. That reason is that on the web, just about everything you do to promote your site can be tracked and if it can be tracked and quantified then a return can be calculated.Â

Over time as you test methods of traffic generation against each other, you will build a portfolio of â€œinvestmentsâ€ you can choose from where the return on investment (ROI) and expected results are clear ahead of time.Â

Test Everythingâ€¦then test some more!

The third fundamental concept of Internet marketing is testing. While you may not be able to afford every possible method of generating traffic, leads, and sales online at first, you can always start small, pay attention to the results and track your progress.Â

Everything should be tested; from the color of your website, to your photos to your offers to various ad formats and advertising platforms etc. The list is truly endless but donâ€™t let this overwhelm you. The key is to pick a few things (marketing tools or concepts) you are going to focus on and then make it a habit to test the various aspects of how you apply each one. For example, if you choose to build an email list and write a newsletter like this one, you might test various ways of asking people to join your list. You might test different subject lines, different content ideas, different calls to action and different offers. The key is continual testing and tracking of your results.

Really itâ€™s about practice and refinement. The more times you practice a sales pitch to a prospective client and the more prospects you see and the more variations you use in the shortest amount of time possible the faster you will arrive at your destination. The great thing about the web is that just about anything can be tested, changed, updated and tracked and this can all happen in a relatively short amount of time. The other interesting thing about the Internet is that small adjustments in how you do things can often bring huge improvements in results. Case in point, in some of the Google Adwords ads Iâ€™ve written for my clients, simply by using a variation of a word â€“ e.g changing the word â€œneedâ€ to â€œwantâ€ in the body of an ad â€“ Iâ€™ve seen an ad pull 20-30% more clicks. On the web it is often about the small details and each of these details can be tested.Â

You can also flip that statement on its head and come at it from another angle which is to only test huge changes. Itâ€™s sometimes too slow to vary every minute detail of a campaign or website for example. In this case you might be best served by making drastic changes and monitoring the results. They key again is to test, test, test!

Test your ad copy, test your landing page copy, test your email copy, email subject lines, and so on. If youâ€™re launching a new site, test what domain name you will go with, test different page layouts and so on. There really is no limit. Yes, you have to be practical about how you use your time, just know that sometimes huge performance increases are a small change away. Also know that by testing and refining each aspect of your site and online marketing, as long as you track your results and keep what works, in time you will end up with compounded, positive results.

I was speaking with a PR firm client last week who mentioned “Frugal is the new cool” and decided it was time to tone down the look of the site. I keep an eye out for trends (as one must do in social media and web marketing) and given the current state of the economy I’m taking his message to heart.Â

I wore a less flashy watch to a meeting today and will be tweaking the site in the coming week or so to see if I can simplify it a bit (yes, it’s already quite simple and I can do better!).

With all the talk lately of recession, marketing in tough economic times etc etc, it makes sense for marketers to be a little less flashy and focus their messages more on the bottom line and how they can make and save their clients money.

For me, that means the site needs to be less about adding widgets and more about focusing on good, solid, valuable content that my clients will find applicable to their businesses.

On that note today’s tip is: Â go back to basics.

Practical applications:

Update and simplify your web site’s theme / designÂ

Don’t be afraid to use or go back to plain text emails or simplified HTML

If blogging or using Twitter, focus on practical tips and less theory (marketers are the most guilty of breaking this one)

I think going frugal is a trend we’re going to see catch on and stick for the next couple of years. As more ideas on this topic come to mind, I’ll post them here.

“Ideas on Tap is a light business networking event for hi-tech professionals in Vancouver plus internet advertisers, social media marketers, bloggers, video game developers and other fans of the tech community.”

The turnout was great (I’d say about 200+ easy) and people were friendly and willing to chat about all things tech. Twitter was of course the topic of many conversations on account of the fact that so many of us locally in the industry have met online first and then face to face at events like this. Funny how it works these days, you meet online first and then in person.

The event was a blast – always great to put faces to names and to meet new and interesting people in the social media / web marketing sphere.

So what’s next up for the local social mediaratzi? Everyone’s heading to Word Camp Whistler for the weekend. Unfortuneately I won’t be attending but may meet up with the gang for beers as I’m heading out the door myself to hit Whistler to do some boarding this weekend.